


Nudity

by Imprise



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, M/M, Moral Ambiguity, POV Sherlock Holmes, Power Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-12 06:07:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12952974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imprise/pseuds/Imprise
Summary: Sherlock starts thinking about John when John employs the casual touch.





	Nudity

**Author's Note:**

> With freedom comes nudity.

 

Sherlock is not used to being touched. He has not been touched and cannot get used to being touched because no one wants to touch him. As he is thinking this he is sitting, a glass of water in his hands. He drinks a lot of water. When he sits without drinking it is as if his mouth turns to salt, as if there are roots of thirst growing down from his tongue to his chest and his feet and he is a capsule of heat, which he has never liked. Once he decided to observe how the feeling would change with time, and couldn't stand waiting, because every cell of his throat went dry. So he is sipping, earthly water, as he waits for John to come home, as John has done a marvelous thing, and Sherlock needs to make it so in his head – he needs to plan it just so – that John keeps doing it.

John touched his hair. Sherlock knows this is a commonplace thing, and he knows he didn't move a muscle as John did so, not an eyelash, not even the blood in his stomach moved as John ran his fingers over Sherlock's skull, because somehow Sherlock knows that that would be weakness. Specifically, he knows that it must be scarcity that allows John to touch him so casually – a hand on his back, reaching for a plate, or on his wrist to stop him – it must be that John feels that Sherlock will not respond, and that Sherlock is untouchable, and that John is doing a good and unacknowledged thing that not many people do. So what Sherlock must do is continue to be untouchable: He needs to be just sufficiently present that John keeps touching him, but never encourage more lest he become easy, and undesirable. He has figured this out through years of stunted affections that have knocked against his brain and made him feel unintelligent. The sky is very blue that day, and Sherlock leans against the window, knowing that he is very bad at controlling his emotions, knowing that he can be in a whole meadow of pain, and that he can make himself starve, and break, and work through decades of sorrow, but he cannot turn off love. He can never make himself not want to be loved. Sherlock mocks, and he tears, and he rubs the right side of his wrist against his ankles, and he shoves away his interest with bitterness, and makes himself think. 

 

John enters the room and doesn't look at Sherlock. Suddenly every nerve of Sherlock's long body is alight. He watches John bend over to pick up a book, rough in the spine, well-loved, well-read, an inane title, John. Obviously John is not quick enough or sweet enough to clash with Sherlock. He doesn't lick his fingers before he turns the pages, which makes Sherlock frown, because he would like to look at the imprints in the light, see the dark patches quiver. He likes it when John sweats too, because John is leaving things of his around when he does that, and never smells too bad. But it is – an unsentimental liking. Sherlock is sure of this, because he liked John's odds and ends from the moment he met him, because John seems both closed and open, and so he can see through him if he likes, of course, but sometimes he doesn't like – he wants to piece together. But it doesn't matter. John isn't looking at him. Sherlock is not about to tell him anything, not if John doesn't give him attention. What does he have to do? John knows he is brilliant already. He has said so himself in various languages, and the sheen of the eye is the one Sherlock liked best, but perhaps he should say it again. He has not told Sherlock that he is beautiful, but Sherlock supposes that's not the sort of thing grown men say to each other. Perhaps he should make John think him beautiful. He is suddenly incensed at the obscene uselessness of this line of thought, but affection is his poison, and his mind starts turning. After a while he fully realizes that he has even forgotten to count minutes, that he does not know how long it has been since he started thinking, so he stops, and he considers something else.

 

Three days later John smiles down at him, tight-lipped, and presses a hand into his shoulder as he is leaving, and Sherlock stays on the sofa cataloguing everything about the pressure of the hand and why John seems so narrow to him.

He is beginning to doubt that John is good. Yes, John once did an excellent thing for him – yes, of course, John killed a man, and so on, and that was good – but Sherlock feels that in terms of caring, he is outdoing John by a margin. The pink woman's case was a long time ago, or at least it seems that way, and Sherlock prefers to tell time by seeming, because that gives insight into how important an event must have been to him. The first time John touched him is very important to him because Sherlock can tell when people Touch him in That way and it was that way, it has to have been, Sherlock feels petrified with irritation. He does not move that day.

 

John is bent on a blood sample and Sherlock has never liked needles, so he decides to put something else in his head and thinks about sucking John's cock. It does not immediately hit him that this is a dangerous thing to do: It seems like an all right way to pass the time until John takes the syringe out again. But time expands between insertion and removal and Sherlock has to make use of all sorts of little details – the weight of John in his mouth, the likely taste of him, the slight tang of sweat and skin, and it's all more real because John is  _there_ , Sherlock can smell him, can smell every single hair down his neck. John pats his arm a little once it's needle-free, and as Sherlock stares at him the old, short, careworn Doctor John flashes through his face: John insisted on doing the test, and he insisted in the same way he always does, but there is such coldness between them – in a way there never used to be – that Sherlock must put it to his being more accessible. If he were better sheltered, he thinks, John would always have had to have been little and tender to him. It frustrates him to no end that he is not more in control, and fears for a second that he is getting soft. But to the rest of the world he is the same as always, and sometimes he looks at John with dead eyes, but once, one day, John asks him almost mockingly what he's thinking: He calls Sherlock strange, and Sherlock thinks it is an outrage to not be able to appreciate being strange in the manner John thinks he is. He does not talk to John for days, but John must assume it's Sherlock being Sherlock, because he doesn't say a word.

 

There is really an untenable amount of thinking. Sherlock takes case after case after case, and John follows him on each one and helps, John is nice, but Sherlock feels his aorta collapsing. It is ridiculous to him that all of this obsessing has come from the mildest of touches. He burns things to collect ashes, and peers at them under a dirty microscope so that he might bear greater aggression against the tool than against himself. But as time passes he feels himself opening: He is turning, as inevitably as a sunflower, as a green root, towards John, who is a cold, cold sun. And being open is absolutely frightful: Sherlock can't remember anything so bad to him as being vulnerable the way he was before, when he was younger, it was absolutely terrible. He used to look into people's mouths for pennies of affection, he remembers wanting things to be real, and of course it wasn't all people he wanted it from but the ones that were there were bad enough. He is thinking outside in a dark street, back against the wall, and it is cold. His nipples contract in the night. It feels so desperately un-Sherlocklike to brood like this, like a licentious heroine, he hates it, it makes him feel depraved, he has never begged anyone for anything and that cannot change. Sherlock feels that he is reproachable, for his inefficiency, and dramaticism, and dullness. He leaves the alley and takes a shower, and the water kisses him down to his toes and he thinks about how John must know that he is beautiful. He dresses in the morning in sharp black clothes and thinks about how he looks edible. Naturally he is working, but it is not immersive working, and John sometimes doesn't take any notice of him but laughs at other people, and Sherlock feels his body burn down from his head to his soles. Every reason Sherlock ever had for hiding is coming back to him manifold. He has excellent regard for himself and wishes he could be safe again. It's always cold because it's London. One day he goes to John and tells him the most naked thing he can think: He tells him “I am letting you take whatever you want,” and stops, and says “from what I am seeing, and hearing, and thinking.” And John doesn't say anything. It crushes a bit of Sherlock's ear to see John not saying anything, it's bewildering, how obtuse can he be? Sherlock waits days but John never says a thing about it. They talk about other, unrelated and uninteresting events, and Sherlock watches his own hair growing for lack of things to do. He drinks whole lakes of water. Once he cannot think he will be no good at all. At the moment he is not very good either: He is not good, and cannot be touched, in any way and any place in the visible universe. Which should be fine. Sherlock curses his self-awareness and wishes it would go away. His self-awareness is like Mycroft, and does not. 

 

It is now three months and Sherlock has seen John spin through three different girlfriends. With each girlfriend he touched Sherlock less and now he treats touching Sherlock like a casual affair, which can indicate only that Sherlock has made the mistake of becoming accessible. He hates himself for it. He rips through cases to remind himself he's not softening. He covers himself with a sheet in his bedroom and counts the light pooling in through every little hole in the linen. He listens to the world moving on outside and can't see a future without John Watson in it. It is disastrous to him. His intelligence sloshes around in his brain and is utterly useless against love. He goes to the window and drinks islands of the night's air, but it makes him only a little better, and then only when he is at the window, and out of the light.

 

He finds one of the girlfriends in the kitchen one day and does not feel anything towards her. It pleases him to see he does not feel for anyone except John in that particularly unpleasant sort of way. She smiles at him and says good morning and he nods, and she says nothing about any sort of mess, and he finds that she is rather tolerable. Her name, as she helpfully and seriously supplies, is Amy. She doesn't make any noise. Sherlock sees that she is sweet, and solemn, level-headed, and better than John is morally. John spent the previous night playing with Sherlock's knuckles. Sherlock knows it cannot have been sexual but it seems out of place.

Amy kisses John sloppily, but with concentration, as if she doesn't quite know how to make her mouth move. She has goosebumps, and Sherlock notes the flat is cold. His spine is stiffening as well. She brushes a finger across John's eyes, and that one move is inconceivably affectionate: Sherlock looks to see whether John has caught it, the extreme nakedness of that brush, the thought that has gone into it, the deliberate caution, the tremulousness of the touch, but John is haughty, John does not care, and Sherlock decides that Amy is all right, and thinks that he would rather like to be a woman.

 

He is simultaneously getting better and worse at cases. The awareness of when John comes and when he leaves punctures every artery, every knob of his spine. He realizes he is glowing with a ferocious intensity; simply to draw John's gaze, he is being deliberately wantable, and cannot fathom why he wants John to want him. Amy flits through the flat more frequently than any woman has, wrapped in a serenity Sherlock admires. Perhaps John has noticed that Sherlock is much less averse to her than he has been to the others. Sherlock cares little about Amy: He knows that his world has narrowed down to John and John's hand, to the way it might stroke him in the shower, in the cab, in between cases, and to the peculiar light in John's eyes. He feels as if he has been fine-tuned to John's particular frequency, and even if he is thinking, even if he is using his brain, he cannot be himself if John is there. Curled against the back of the sofa, sickened to the bone, he decides to remove John from the ring of his body. John strolls into the room after some hours and scratches Sherlock's neck, down his spine, going slow.

 

They are in bed together. This is how it happened: Sherlock took him out for a drink without meaning to, and John asked him how he was. The drinking occurred as a predictable result of having to fetch John to bask in the love of him, and John happening to be in a bar. And John asked him how he was. Sherlock said fair, and drank a little, thinking that was good enough, but John asked more, asked after his hesitation, and Sherlock said “You never responded.” He had to remind John of the bald statement John had ignored, after which John sort of smiled and said, “Oh, that. That was a long time ago. Yes, I didn't understand why you said it.” He took a sip and said, “It was odd.” Sherlock was furious with himself for letting John make odd and strange into bad things, and for expecting tenderness from John, who had killed a man but it was long ago, and for expecting tenderness. John drank a bit more and held Sherlock's hand by the palm. He said, “I'm cold.” Sherlock smeared a hand over John's face and said, “I'm colder.” He was. His finger caught John's mouth and the dryness of his mouth and John's mouth became wet, and Sherlock put the wet finger to his nose, and tasted John's saliva. It tasted like nothing. John reached across and kissed him. John's tongue was large and warm. Sherlock let John kiss him. They went home and while they were going home Sherlock's hand was on John's arm, but very lightly, and in a way Sherlock hoped was cool and shut-off. They kissed a little more against the door and took off their shoes and coats. Sherlock felt very little. His head was somewhere else. Particularly it was on dielectrics. He thought about asking John what he knew about dielectrics but knew that John would find it odd, even if he was himself a man of science. Sherlock wanted his oddnesses to be admired. The irritation of it made him take John's shirt off incautiously. It bared John's scar and John's scar's face. John retaliated by stripping Sherlock to his pants, and took him into his bed. It was John's bed. Sherlock did not pull John down, so John sank over him, and sucked the tips of his fingers. And stopped. And now they are in bed together.

“Move a little,” Sherlock tells him. Somehow it makes him feel powerful to say it, and he takes care to sound impartial, to get his way with him. John moves, and they are lying side by side, and red outdoors light trickles onto their bare legs and chests, and onto John's hand on Sherlock's nipple. There's something absolutely wrong about how they've gotten here, how frenzied and single-minded he has been about John, about how John has hidden his hand all along while Sherlock showed him his long ago, long before he had conceived of John as a real object of desire, and about how John is so cold inside. Sherlock has made himself secure in his shell and it makes him uneasy to see someone else be more secure without illusion. Sherlock's snarl is illusion. Not to say he's soft, of course, but he likes, deeply, the way of the world when it is good, when it is moving, when people are moving, and not loud, and he likes some people, and he likes John, and he can't tell John, anything, and he can't tell whether he likes John, or he likes being touched by John, because John helps, and John writes, and John does blood tests and John strikes, but John is indifferent, and Sherlock cannot let him be so. They are still lying together and it does things to Sherlock's heart, which he wishes was silent. There is no work to be done so he must think about John. John's mouth is behind Sherlock's scapulae, but it is not touching, it is waiting, and warm. Sherlock remembers the wetness of it and shudders. He wants John to jump his bones, and then to shake them, one by one, between two fingers, knowing how important it is to do so, knowing how naked he has forced Sherlock to be. But John _doesn't_ , he sits up and leaves. Sherlock lies in the pigsblood night without moving. 

In the morning John emerges from Sherlock's room. Sherlock is in his old clothes working at the kitchen table with a narrow mouth. It is absolutely wicked for John to have slept in Sherlock's bed. And Sherlock suddenly does not know how to confront him about it: He cannot ask him what he was doing in his room, because it is  _obvious_ , and he cannot ask why John left because that's vulnerable, and he  _knows_ why John left, it is clear – it has been plain as day from the very beginning – but he resents it anyway. Sherlock resents that John does not want to engage with him as deeply as he might, as he almost has, as he wants to, and Sherlock resents that John substitutes other things for the wanting, and that John is indifferent, that he shelters his emotions, that he is still together with Amy, that John rejected him. So when Sherlock opens his mouth, he tells John to leave.

“Sorry?” John says. Sherlock doesn't repeat himself. John stands, considering, obviously surprised, then starts to move to the table. Sherlock goes cold with his entire body and John stops. “Why?” he says.

“Inconvenient,” Sherlock decides to tell him. “Your being here.”

“Inconvenient?” John sounds incredulous, and then he begins to sound angry. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” Sherlock says, putting down his scalpel, “that you disguise your desires by use of various distractions but do not allow me the same luxury, and instead choose to shadow my expressions of regard with indifference while ensuring that I keep wanting you, touching when it serves your purpose, when you grow lonely, when I appear to be safe.” He does not let John see how much he hates himself for exposing his bitterness, but meets John's eyes, and they are shocked, and confused. 

“Sherlock,” John says, but Sherlock isn't listening. John has commandeered his body and his space and he is livid. Sherlock can kill John right here in the flat and dispose of him in broad daylight. He can live at peace without a trace of mourning. Sherlock knows eighteen different things about what John has done this morning just by looking at John's face, and when John turns away he is struck clearly by John's jugular, its protrusion, its warmth, and hates it. 

John comes back around afternoon. Nothing is unexpected to Sherlock, for whom the veil across life has been lifted once again, just as it had been when his eye first fixed on all the myriad tells of the human body. He is using his own laptop to scroll through potential cases. John hesitates on the doorstep, looking chagrined. Sherlock pays him no mind.

“Sherlock,” he says again. To Sherlock it is as if he is repeating the word mere minutes after he said it. There has been much to do since John walked away. “I wasn't thinking of it that way,” John says. Sherlock has closed. John comes closer, and Sherlock doesn't care, he types out an answer to a particularly easy question because there is no reason not to. 

“I do care about the things you told me.” John draws a chair to the kitchen table, straddles it. Sherlock wonders at this display of comfort: Is John a sociopath? It is unnatural the way he is sitting, the way his face reflects perfect shame, perfect uncertainty, then suddenly shines out with an odd, ferocious purpose, something Sherlock might term joy. Sherlock draws his limbs in, unconsciously. He doesn't fear John because John might be strange; he is wary of him because John has his heart. Somewhere inside himself he rejoices: He has fallen for a peculiar man. It had bothered him immensely to think he was attracted to John despite his mediocrity; now he knows he must have known, before, that John was somewhat mad. It is good to know. He looks at John's eyes. They are red like the blazing light that coated Sherlock tip to toe as he slept. They are red around the edges and in the pupils. John has a face like a tight-hearted colonel. He has a face like a clam. “I was,” John says, “surprised,” he says, “to learn you wanted me.” He scratches his wrist. “I became confused. I hadn't realized I appeared indifferent.” He looks at Sherlock. “You're not comfortable with me.”

“No,” Sherlock says. It is unnecessary. John squints at him.

“I wanted to make love to you,” he says. The words make love sound out of place. Sherlock would prefer _fuck._ “But something stopped me. You were all tucked in. I didn't know how to get you to breathe.”

“You slept in my bed,” Sherlock points out. 

“I didn't think you would mind. You were in my bed.” Sherlock doesn't mention how he has told John, shown John, fairly explicitly, so many times, how to make him breathe. John sounds more rational than he does, explaining away, and he's disgusted by it. He wants John to fuck him right here over the kitchen table. He faces the other way. John presses on.

“I'd like to try again.”

Sherlock's heart corrodes. “No.”

“It would be good to try again,” John says mildly. He adds, “Amy and I broke up.” Sherlock knows. He looked at John as he came in, and was slightly put off that he would never see her particular, knowing quietness again, her space, her stability like fresh air. It strikes him as fairly amusing that he likes John's ex-lover more purely and fully than he does John. They are going to be bad for each other.

“Let me try again,” John attempts. Sherlock knows he could turn John out now and be rid of his wavering, his inconstancy, his resentment. Instead he says nothing, and John walks into his body, his shoulders, his mouth, and presses his thumb right against the crook of Sherlock's elbow where he pierces him, where Sherlock has pierced himself, not liking needles, and he kisses Sherlock, kisses him, Sherlock is sitting and John has his head by his neckskin, John has a hand in Sherlock's trousers, Sherlock's bones. Sherlock will not touch him, he is too good to touch him, Sherlock has tried to give enough, but he takes all of John's hands. He is receiving John's dead cells. He is letting him milk Sherlock's live ones. Sherlock doesn't make a sound as he comes, but he opens his mouth, and John inserts his fingers there, one, two, and Sherlock has to swallow around them, so that John comes as well, into his own hand, groaning like a man. And they sit there, John's legs around Sherlock's, his soft cock against Sherlock's pants, and he kisses Sherlock's neck with his nose, and says “I am sorry for what I did.” Sherlock doesn't believe him but he lets John bite the larger vein fast out of his throat, and seizes John's face to look at him, and there is nothing more clear than John's face, radiating pleasure, a piecemeal self-aware joy, and Sherlock smiles, knowing John is inhuman, squeezing his heart away.

 

 


End file.
